From developer to software architect

Software developers often long to upgrade their careers by becoming software architects. But many don't realize that although the job title suggests a work day focused on technical decision making, the reality is quite different. Over two days, Nathaniel Schutta details the skills you need for success in the real world, where communication trumps coding, as he walks you through what it means to be a successful architect.

What you'll learn-and how you can apply it

By the end of this live online course, you’ll understand:

The skill sets needed to juggle multiple priorities, meetings, and time demands

Why your best team leadership tool is not a hammer but a shared cup of coffee

The best ways to give and take criticism

The necessity of writing effective emails and formal architecture documents

How to deliver confident career-building presentations to any audience

Essential techniques for stakeholder management and relationship building

The critical needs for architecture reviews and an effective process for conducting them

And you’ll be able to:

Identify likely quality attributes for a given project as well as architectural decisions that would result from those quality attributes

Assess the pros and cons of a given library, framework, language, or technology

Create architectural artifacts like context and component diagrams

This training course is for you because...

You're a newly minted architect with a strong technical background who wants to hit the ground running in your new role.

You're a senior technical person asked to make architectural decisions on your projects, and you want to sharpen your skills.

About your instructor

Nathaniel T. Schutta is a solution architect focused on making usable applications. A proponent of polyglot programming, Nate has written two books on Ajax and speaks regularly at various worldwide conferences, No Fluff Just Stuff symposia, universities, and Java user groups. In addition to his day job, Nate is an adjunct professor at the University of Minnesota, where he teaches students to embrace dynamic languages. Most recently, Nate coauthored Presentation Patterns with Neal Ford and Matthew McCullough.

Schedule

The timeframes are only estimates and may vary according to how the class is progressing

Day 1

What does it mean to be an architect? (30 minutes)

Lecture and hands-on exercises: Roles and expectations of an architect (It isn’t what you think it is.)

Day 2

Architecting for the “-ilities” (30 minutes)

Lecture and hands-on exercises: Architecture is all about trade-offs; determining which “-ilities” matter; Architectural Katas; a walk-through of the iDon’t Drive System; determining if you've violated an "-illity"

Fitness functions (30 minutes)

Lecture and hands-on exercises: Ensuring your applications evolve in the way you intended; fitness functions